CarolineJMolloy

@carolinejmolloy

Writer, plant-lover, water-baby, #healthpolicy nerd. Ex-OpenDemocracy UK editor. NUJ/Unite/Green. Grew up on free school meals. Stroud-based. caroline.molloy@cantab.net

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CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· 1d

Fortunately there was a very communal eclipse glasses and pinhole camera-sharing vibe at my nearest vantage point (but I still can’t help thinking about this…👇)

Triffid looms over couple - scene from Day of the Triffids

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· 2d

ITV came to Stroud to talk about our Lido, how lucky we are to have it, and how we have to fight to keep them (and build more!)

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· 6d

Today’s reading - enjoying Dan Evans’ book very much, then got to the page about a classic ethnography of small farmers in Norfolk

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DAN EVANS shopkeepers, this was a portrait of a libertarian group with signiticant similarities with the shopkeeper, although there were also important differences. Unlike the shops, many of which had been bought by former wage labourers keen to move up in the world, the small farms had generally been inherited, and hence family played a disproportionate role in the lives of the farmers. This group was also a "clannish" self-contained world: marriage was almost exclusively to other tarming tamilies and was central for land transfers and business, and the extended family and social circle was also rooted in farming, ensuring the reproduction of the class. Like the shopkeepers, the small farmer's focus on family informed a highly traditional, patriarchal way of life in which women were expected to provide domestic duties while the males pertormed the tarm labour. As in Mills' study, they eschewed formal education, believing it to be a waste of time, instead emphasizing the importance of
practical sense and learning on the job. And like the shopkeeper, the small farmers were active politically. They were motivated by a deep hatred of taxation on land (and on inheritance), and shared the shopkeeper's hatred of big business, expressing great hostility to industrialization and what they perceived as meddling in rural affairs by outsiders and planners (i.e., the specific rural manifestation of the traditional hatred of bureaucracy). Of particular note was the farmer's "us and them" siege mentality, created by this isolated, precarious existence. They voted Tory but, like the shopkeeper, could not be said to support the status quo or be dyed-in-the- wool Tories. Their precarity meant that they were generally angry at everything, and this anger was directed both up and down: "Us', in this case, was the 'little man' striving to earn an honest living against the predatory demands

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· 10d

I don’t know why (or if, or when) it became illegal to take account of a company’s “values and ethics”- seems to me that considering whether a company founder holds values like “democracy sucks”, might be a good idea before handing massive chunks of public money & security apparatus to them?

Palantir claims that Khan's office blocked the contract unlawfully and "irrationally," citing comments attributed to the mayor's spokesperson which referred to the company's
unspecified "values and ethics.

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· 10d

weird cognitive dissonance over on X, which seems to be wall to wall right wing grifters whose media / hate careers are based on supposedly protecting women & girls, all in deep mourning about the guy who wrote this

I never found out because the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I'd be right in there, on day one. Were talking secondary school level here, by the way — and even then I don't think I'd have dabbled much below year ten, as it is now called. I just thought we ought to clear that
up early on. At my old comprehensive

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· 18d

“A terrorist sentencing also means defendants’ serve at least two-thirds of their tariff in prison, much longer than is the norm. To obtain parole they must rescind their political views.”

Palestine Action activists face being sentenced as terrorists over bank damage.

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Jul 2

my job was to write “just transition/green jobs” policies for Unite 15 years ago, & it was a battle even then, but things have gone backwards because of Graham’s avowed disinterest in big P Politics, which just lets entrenched interests go unchallenged.

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Jun 30

it is however true that our pool in Stroud was opened by the first ever Labour chair of Stroud Urban District Council, Cllr Tom Langham (the founding stone in his name is still visible)

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Jun 9

cool

The Leveller
I640S • ENGLAND • RADICAL
DEMOCRAT
An Agreement of the People You think no one is born marked for another's mastery, and that a just government is one the people themselves have agreed to-on paper, in plain words they can hold it to. The poorest he has a life to
live as the greatest he. REPRESENTATIVE FIGURES John
Lilburne, Thomas Rainsborough,
Richard Overton
• READ MORE Primary: An Agreement of the People
(1647) Secondary: Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972),
Marxist frame

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· May 29

Lots of discussion about young people in the news, how invisible they are in our politics. Here's a few thoughts on why 🧵

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· May 9

I spent 80s, 90s & 00s in Haringey, Hackney & Waltham Forest. I saw Labour councils turn from a left politics that had our backs, to corporate schmoozefests. I am so delighted that @haringeygreens.bsky.social @wfgreens.bsky.social @hackneygreenparty.bsky.social have taken the reins - long overdue

From my child's-eye perspective that
'loony left' Haringey council was doing a lot of amazing stuff, and shielding us from the worst excesses of Thatcherism.
It let me go on a week's holiday to an adventure centre in Wales, for the princely sum of five pounds (as I was getting free school meals). Its local swimming pool was affordable and had four pools. The local park had a paddling pool and a park keeper and all kinds of free games you could borrow.
The local library was a wonderful temple to books (though I did have to make a special request to borrow the Enid Blytons that were begrudgingly stashed in the archives). We still got our school free milk - despite Thatcher. We had the best firework display in London (amidst the "ooohs",
" my mum said "This
is what I pay my rates for" "What are rates?" I asked).

And we were the lucky ones. For six years I was a housing officer in Islington and Hackney, and saw first-hand the social tenants who were being driven into stressful rent arrears and in some cases eviction by the utter incompetence of the privatised housing benefit management that both councils had signed up to. The tenants who were labelled and hounded with the newly. fashionable term 'anti-social behaviour' because their kids no longer had anywhere safe to play and hang out - though no-one accused the 4x4 drivers zooming dangerously through their communities of 'anti-social behaviour The tenants who were being 'decanted' from tower blocks in the areas they'd lived in all their lives, some admittedly to beautiful riverside low rises - but plenty more out to Stevenage and beyond. And that was even before tenants had to deal with the bedroom tax, the benefits cap, and ever more penurious benefits systems and housing law.

In Waltham Forest - where I lived for 10 years - I saw the Labour council try to outsource school management to G4S - who suggested their experience of running prisons could be useful in terms of keeping the local youth in line
- before giving up amidst controversy, and settling on giving the running of schools to a warship manufacturer instead. I went to 'consultation' meetings run by 'consultation and regeneration consultants' who had glossy leaflets and smiles but no answers for local residents angry about proposals to build a school with a
'landmark' tower block on top of it, on a flood plain (I kid you not). I saw scandal after scandal unfold around the fraudulent mis-use of regeneration money intended to help the poorest communities in a poor borough, whilst the council's main priority seemed to be a war on chicken shops.
I saw the Labour-run council destroy or lose half the boroughs' library books in their rush to 'regenerate' library.

where I realised that somewhere along the line, too many Labour councillors had stopped seeing local residents needing services as potential allies, and started seeing them as feckless scroungers to be gate-kept and dehumanised. They had bought into the myths of 'localism' and the flattery that they could run things better than Whitehall, even as the reality was money and power given to
unaccountable corporate 'partners'.
Their self-aggrandisement was left largely unchallenged, thanks to a dying local press no longer sending reporters to most council meetings, and by a national media uninterested, until very recently at least, in things like housing and social care.
These bad habits were developed long before the 2008 financial crisis really made things tough. In the Blair years, being tough on services used mostly by poorer women and children became something of a macho rite of passage for ambitious New Labour councillors. The process was smoothed over bv an

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· May 7

use your vote today, if you have one. Don't vote for people who scapegoat incomers. And then tomorrow we start the real work of making it matter.

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Mar 5

Really not loving the new Labour aesthetic…

Rachel Reeves, shot from below, gazing at the middle distance, in a pose some have said reminiscent of “Tomorrow belongs to me”

Shabana Mahmood dressed in a coat widely compared to the generals on the Death Star

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Mar 4

imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I guess

Labour is standing up for working people. Being able to manage the bills, attord a home and pay for a holiday is never
too much to ask.
CHANCELLOR RACHEL REEVES
ALT
5709_26 Promoted by Hollie Ridley on behalf of the Labour Party, both at 20 Rushworth Street, London, SEI OSS
4:59 PM • Mar 3, 2026 • 153.5K Views

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Mar 3

Best poll yet for the Greens, and it’s YouGov Reform 23 Greens 21 Tories & Labour both 16 news.sky.com/story/greens...

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Mar 2

🤭

Matt’s next job could be in plumbing (he just doesn’t know it yet)

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Mar 1

Oh is *that* why they‘re so bizarrely obsessed with Galloway, cos beating him was how Mahmood cut her teeth? I mean I dunno who‘s got Starmer‘s ear rn but the dreadful Mahmood would seem quite a likely candidate

Pic of Rayner, Starmer and Mahmood

Text: She was drafted in to run the party's campaign operation after the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021. Starmer would have faced calls to quit had he lost the ensuing contest in Batley &
Spen, in which George Galloway was standing. After getting her feet under the table, she recalls: "I was like, 'Oh my God, what's going on, there's nothing there." She summoned her inner-Kashmiri woman, she says, imposing early morning starts and warning colleagues
they would "probably hate my guts",
",but saying, "I will be working just as hard as you." The party defied Galloway, later delivering a string of other by-election victories and setting
Starmer on his current course.

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 28

This did well on Insta so I thought I’d share it with you #GreenMenace

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 27

God this juxtaposition is just 👌

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 27

Oh thats a bit before my time but still familiar somehow! I wrote a long thing about councils including this

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 27

indeed. this is Trumpian bad loser desperation from Reform, which will be picked up by their supporters in the billionaire-owed media, whose job is to fight against hope and progressive politics

Manchester City Council, whose returning officer oversees the election, has now responded, saying polling station staff are trained to look out for any evidence of undue
influence on voters. "No such issues have been reported today," a spokesperson for the acting returning officer
says. "If Democracy Volunteers were so concerned about alleged issues they could and should have raised them with us during polling hours
so that immediate action could be taken. "We have operated a central by-election hub which has been rapidly responding to reported issues during the day, in liaison with the police - who had a presence at every
polling station - where necessary. "It is extremely disappointing that Democracy Volunteers have waited until after polls have
closed to make such claims."

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 27

things can change

Peter Mandelson said to Peter Hain: 'Your
preoccupation with the working class is wrong.
Thev've got nowhere else to go.' Peter

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 26

Um?

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 26

WTAF Cc @electoralcommission.org.uk

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 26

this is damning, & also echoes my own personal experiences - watching Labour fail to explain & oppose how NHS privatisation was happening cos they‘d been up to their neck in it too, watching them junk a council coalition with Greens even at risk of letting Tories take over. *enough is enough*

If stopping Reform were the overriding aim, Labour would also deploy what research shows is the killer attack line against that party. A survey of 6,000 people by the group Persuasion UK found that by far the most effective message of five options was focused
on corporate interests and went as follows: "Nigel Farage says he's on people's side - but when you take a closer look it's pretty clear who he's really fighting for, isn't it? It's the rich, the powerful, his mates in big business." It explained that Reform UK has taken vast donations from fossil fuel investors and climate science deniers. This, Persuasion UK said, is why Farage wants to cut public services, workers' rights and taxes for the richest. "He's not smashing the system. He
and his rich friends basically are the system." None of the other attack lines came anywhere near this for efficacy. So why doesn't Labour use it? Because that might alienate the people Starmer seems keenest to appease: Labour's own corporate backers and the billionaire proprietors of the rightwing press. The leadership's key objective is not stopping Farage, but frightening people into voting
Labour. Quite frankly, it has nothing else left.

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 26

Saying the quiet part out loud there, Allister

[those who believe that the problems are] overblown; that today's minorities will rapidly become latter-day Huguenots or Irish immigrants, indistinguishable from the rest of the population in all
but surname, are delusional.

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 26

One the subject of very unserious people, the Allister Heath headline generator is fun stirring-fox-7e1fab.netlify.app

Allister Heath
We are sleepwalking
into a totalitarian nightmare disguised as
taramasalata
ALLISTER HEATH
The Telegraph

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 26

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 25

Sarah Vine compares @zackpolanski.bsky.social to a 'rat' previously compared @ed-miliband.bsky.social to an 'alien' I find these epithets, applied to the two Jewish political party leaders of recent years, highly dubious, coming from someone who claims to be deeply concerned about antisemitism

The answer, of course, is Zack Polanski, whose emergence on the political stage is the equivalent of discovering a rather nasty wasps' nest in your roof, or realising that a rat has died under your floorboards.

There's nothing here that makes me believe that he and Justine are not, in fact, aliens. No evidence of food-stuffs, certainly. Perhaps they get their

SARAH VINE: Why their kitchen tells you all you need to know about the mirthless Milibands... and why there's nothing to suggest that Ed and Justine are not, in fact, aliens

CarolineJMolloy@carolinejmolloy· Feb 25

Give me the Green Menace 😆 over the Blue Meanies, the Turquoise Twits, and the Red Reformists :-)